The president of Mexico, Claudia Sheinbaum, expressed this Monday her disagreement with the exclusion of Cuba, Nicaragua and Venezuela from the next Summit of the Americas to be held in December in the Dominican Republic, which, she said, she will not attend, to attend to matters in her country.
“No, I am not going to attend,” Sheinbaum said bluntly in his daily conference at the National Palace and added that his government is analyzing whether there will be representation from Mexico: “that is what we are looking at, to see if there will be someone from the Foreign Ministry who could go.”
“Personally, first, we never agree that any country be excluded, or we do not agree that any country be excluded, but also, in the current circumstance, no. We must be attending to the country and in particular the emergency (floods due to intense rains in the center of the country that left 64 dead so far),” added the president.
Since coming to power in October 2024, Sheinbaum has made just four international trips: the G20 summit in Brazil in November 2024, the Celac summit in Honduras in April, the G7 in Canada in June and a trilateral meeting in Guatemala with the president, Bernardo Arévalo, and the prime minister of Belize, Johnny Briceño, in August.
On September 30, the Dominican Foreign Ministry reported on the decision of the Government of Luis Abinader not to invite Cuba, Nicaragua and Venezuela to the 10th Summit of the Americas, which will be held on December 4 and 5 in Punta Cana, in the east of the Caribbean country.
In a statement, he specified that upon assuming the pro tempore presidency in 2023, the Dominican Executive announced that said summit would be inclusive, “a purpose that we seek to honor”; However, “in the current context of political polarization, we have decided to prioritize the success of the meeting, extending the invitation to as many countries as possible.”
In that sense, “the non-invitation to Cuba, Nicaragua and Venezuela—countries that, for various reasons, have decided not to be part of the OAS and that did not participate in the last edition of the Summit of the Americas—constitutes the decision that, given the hemispheric circumstances, favors the greatest call and ensures the development of the forum,” stated the note published on the Foreign Ministry’s website.
The decision not to invite them on this occasion “responds to a strictly multilateral criterion,” said the Foreign Ministry, which also stressed that the bilateral relationship of the Dominican Republic with each of these States “maintains its own characteristics.”
The IX Summit of the Americas, held in Los Angeles (USA) in 2022, was also marked by the non-invitation to Havana, Managua and Caracas, and did not include the participation of the then Mexican president, Andrés Manuel López Obrador (2018-2024).
